Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Back when I was single and living in Tokyo, I ended up spending a night in a park for reasons I won't go into here. It was a warm summer night and I found a reasonably comfortable park bench, so I managed to fall asleep pretty quickly.

I awoke to the sound of voices. A yakuza was standing about five feet away looking down at me. Two more yakuza were standing about 10 yards away. One of them said, "Yaru nara, hayaku yare" -- "If you're gonna do it, hurry up." The yakuza standing by me looked at them and then back at me. Our eyes met. I held the eye contact, and we stared at each other for a few seconds. He looked away, muttered, "Yameta" -- "The hell with it" -- and walked off with the other two guys. I went back to sleep.

The yakuza dude probably thought I was all hard and intimidating staring him down like that, but really I was too sleepy to know what the heck was going on. It wasn't until I woke up the next morning that I realized, "Hey, that guy was gonna mug me!"